Relative Happinness
by EmmanuelleG
Summary: Happiness is relative and, like everything else, a variable. Elizabeth goes through her fair share of Bookers, but it's never enough, never the same, and never leads to peace.


The thing about Booker DeWitt is that she loves how he feels.

DeWitt.

Comstock.

Different names, but both apply to the same man.

One she loves and cries after drowning him; the other's blood is a warm, pleasant sensation on her cheek, and then her face, as it splashes all over her while he struggles to understand why she pushed him onto the Big Daddy's drill.

* * *

She loves how he feels when he takes her hands, thinking it's the first time when in turn she's been through the steps a hundred times. But Elizabeth indulges him because, in a way, it still is a novelty. This is Booker, her Booker, but not really, not quite. He knows nothing, suspects little, and if sometimes he stares at her an instant too long as if she's a reflection of a phantom he's never encountered, Elizabeth just smiles.

* * *

"Look at DeWitt. Got himself a little lady, that one."

"God never punishes the Pinkertons, it seems."

* * *

He whispers something she can't quite understand as he pulls her up the stairs and to his tiny apartment. Ten steps from the hallway to the door - she's been here before.

His hands on her waist, impatient, tugging off her dress before they're even through the door. Elizabeth shivers and remembers that she's a paradox, a child of both worlds, a victim of cruelty, faith, unfairness and so many more. She deserves happiness in any form and she is selfish.

His lips taste of whiskey and not of salt.

Then again, she never experienced the original lips, the ones that uttered her name first and made all subsequent times a tad less exciting. Her Booker is gone.

She smiles. He opens her arms. She locks the door.

"What's your name?" he asks.

"Elizabeth."

"Dignified."

Afterwards she rests on his chest, enjoying its rise and fall, knowing she can't stay but loathe to go.

And then she sees it, and it's more painful than any of his deaths. A simple wooden cross.

"Didn't take you for the religious type," she tells him, shutting her eyes so tight, praying even though she hates it - hates God.

"Not sure if I am...not sure..."

When he falls asleep, Elizabeth cuts his throat.

* * *

This is a Tear she wishes she'd never gone through.

She sees them, a small family, moderately happy. He - not a great parent. She - a daughter longing for better things, but not a caged bird. Still, they love each other. Booker DeWitt puts his arms around Anna, holding her in a way she'll never experience.

And she knows she ought to be happy, for him, for herself, for her perfect replica and reflection - but she's not.

She is Elizabeth Comstock, never to be Booker DeWitt's child.

She turns around and runs away. Stopping, she gets sick in the middle of the street while accusing eyes throw glares.

Still, this isn't the end of anything.

* * *

"I brought you flowers."

Elizabeth carefully arranges a bouquet on the gravestone of a man who never met her.

* * *

That's her life. From on Tear to the next. From one Booker to the other.

She's his constant, he's her variable.

* * *

One day she realizes that she is broken beyond repair. She cries and she screams and she finds temporary solace in arms of different Bookers - all of whom she loves with all heart until it's time to go - but nothing makes it better.

"You could stay, you know," one of them tells her as she's buttoning her blouse.

"I...know," Elizabeth answers. For a moment she considers it, truly, really, so much that it hurts. A smile battles its way to her lips because she sees nothing.

Nothing wrong. Why couldn't she stay?

But then a door opens. And she sees that Anna hasn't been born yet.

And she leaves, understanding yet again that she - they - did the right thing by committing murder - suicide - but now her life has no purpose.

* * *

Her rage culminates in a final act of defiance.

She finds a Comstock just as broken as she is and shatters him to pieces before killing him.

* * *

_This is the last one_, her mind whispers. _The last one, the last one, the last one..._

_There's always a lighthouse, always a man, always a city._

_Play the guitar for me, Booker_, Elizabeth thinks while bleeding out.

Even a memory of him which fails to appear feels good.


End file.
